"The crockery farmer of Dry Willow Valley." Evie did not slow her walk. "I'm just asking because I want to understand the system," Hiram continued, and she could hear the pleasure he was taking in it.
"Do you plant the corn around the pots or the pots around the corn? And what do you do when you accidentally harvest a jar instead of a squash? Just curious about the method." The men with him laughed. One of them was still laughing when Evie reached the freight counter and picked up her loading paperwork. "$46," Hiram said.
He had clearly been saving this one. "My wife spent less setting up her whole kitchen. You want my honest opinion, Evie? The only crop you're going to grow out of 300 clay pots is a field full of bad jokes." She signed the loading form.
She said nothing. She had learned that certain men expanded when given attention and contracted when denied it, and Hiram Bell was that kind of man. She gave him nothing and turned to supervise the loading. She was aware, in the sideways way you are aware of things you decide not to look at directly, that Silas Ward was near the livery. She was aware that he did not laugh, and that he did not say anything in her defense, which was something she hadn't asked for and wouldn't have wanted.
The fact that he simply stood there without joining in was its own statement, even if it was a quiet one. She loaded the first crate herself. She corrected the hired hand who dropped a crate six inches instead of setting it down. He gave her the look that men give young women who tell them to be more careful and she returned the look that makes that expression stop. By midday the wagon was loaded and she was four miles down the road.
The washout caught her completely off guard. It was there in the road a channel where winter runoff had carved through the packed dirt, nearly eighteen inches deep and three feet wide right along the wheel track. Someone had laid brush across it as a temporary crossing and it had looked solid enough from the wagon seat. It held for about half a second. The right front wheel broke through hard, not a slow tilt, a sudden lurch that threw Evie against the seat rail and sent the wagon swinging with a sound she felt in her back teeth.
She heard the clay before she understood what she was hearing, a high sharp crack, then another, then a cascading clatter of pot on pot that meant the damage was already happening and she couldn't stop it. She got the brakes set. She got the horses calm. Then she climbed down and looked at what she had. The wheel was wedged into the channel.
The wagon bed had canted left far enough that crates had slid hard against the rail. Straw was spilling through the slats. When she put her weight on the step, she heard the sound of clay pieces shifting against each other and the sound was wrong. She stood there for maybe 3 seconds.